VALIE EXPORT

Early Life and Education

VALIE EXPORT was born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Upper Austria, where she was raised by a single mother. She studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna before relocating to the capital’s vibrant art scene in the 1960s. Export’s decision to adopt the name VALIE EXPORT in 1967 was itself an artistic act—a bold assertion of identity in a Viennese landscape dominated by the Vienna Actionists, including Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. While influenced by the movement’s transgressive ethos, Export distinguished her practice through its explicit feminist framework, using her body as both subject and medium to confront gender politics and voyeurism in art and society. She remains based primarily in Vienna and Linz.

Artworks and Style

VALIE EXPORT’s practice centres on the body as a site of political and aesthetic intervention, fundamentally challenging how bodies are represented, consumed, and experienced in image culture. Her innovative use of the body as artistic medium predates and runs parallel to international performance art movements, positioning her among the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

Expanded Cinema and Performance (1968–1971)

Export’s most iconic works emerge from her development of ‘expanded cinema’—a radical reimagining of film practice that replaces celluloid with the artist’s body and public space. TAPP und TASTKINO (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968–1971) was performed across ten European cities including Vienna and Munich. For this work, Export wore a small mock cinema constructed from Styrofoam and later aluminium, strapped directly to her bare chest. She invited passing pedestrians to insert their hands through an opening and feel her breasts, inverting the voyeuristic regime of cinema by substituting tactile encounter for visual pleasure. The work radically reframes the film experience: instead of sitting in darkness before projected images, viewers became active participants in direct physical contact with the artist’s body in public space.

In Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), Export entered a pornographic cinema in Munich wearing crotchless trousers and carrying a machine gun. Moving through the theatre rows with wild hair and aggressive posture, she forced male spectators to confront a ‘real woman’ rather than mediated images on screen, directly reversing the sexual objectification that structured both cinema and everyday viewing practices. Through these guerrilla performances, Export weaponised her presence, reclaiming bodily autonomy and agency in spaces designed for male voyeurism.

Photography, Video, and Conceptual Practice (1970s–1980s)

Following her early performance actions, Export transitioned to photography, video, and expanded cinema investigations that maintained her preoccupation with perception, the body, and the ideological construction of gender and vision. Split Reality (1970, 1973 installation version) deconstructs the relationship between sound and image by positioning a vinyl record player and television set within a unified spatial frame; Export listens to the record through headphones whilst the TV’s sound is silenced, fragmenting the unified sensory experience viewers expect.

Her extensive series of conceptual photographs from the 1970s interrogate how mass media constructs and naturalises gender identity through technical reproduction and image circulation. Works such as Body Sign Action (1970) and Street Intersection Belgium (1973) employ the camera to document and reimagine spatial relationships, undermining the authority of central perspective and revealing it as an ideologically constructed rather than natural way of seeing.

In 1980, Export represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, presenting Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), a sculptural installation of a raised platform supporting a female abdomen rendered in fleshy form, illuminated by red neon light strips emanating from between its splayed legs. The work provocatively literalises the female body as site of reproduction, birth, and contested visibility.

Recent Practice (2000s–present)

Export’s investigations into the relationship between body, performance, and mediated image continue throughout the 2000s and beyond. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, she performed the voice as performance, act and body (2007), projecting live video footage from a miniature camera inserted inside her throat as she read text aloud for twelve minutes. The work extends her decades-long interrogation of cinema and vision, now literally turning the interior of the body—the throat, the site of voice production—into a visual field, collapsing distinctions between interiority and exhibition, voice and image.

Recent exhibitions have consolidated Export’s legacy as a foundational figure in video art, expanded cinema, and feminist art history, with major institutional presentations across Europe and internationally.

Awards and honours of VALIE EXPORT

• 2022: Max Beckmann Prize, City of Frankfurt
• 2020: Golden Nica Visionary Pioneer of Feminist Media Art, Prix Ars Electronica
• 2019: Roswitha Haftmann Prize (€120,000; Europe’s largest single-award art prize)
• 2021: Honorary Fellowship, Royal Photographic Society
• 2010: Grand Gold Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria
• 2009: Honorary Doctorate, University of Art and Design Linz
• 2005: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
• 2003: Gold Medal for Services to the City of Vienna
• 2000: Oskar Kokoschka Prize; Alfred Kubin Prize Big Prize Culture of Upper Austria
• 1997: Gabriele Münter Prize
• 1995: Sculpture Award, Generali Foundation
• 1992: Austrian Prize for Video and Media Art
• 1990: City of Vienna Prize for Visual Arts

Exhibitions of VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT’s work has been exhibited extensively across major international museums and contemporary art institutions, with solo presentations at leading European and international venues including MoMA, the Tate, Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Biennale.

Select solo exhibitions

• MAK Center for Art and Architecture at Schindler House, Los Angeles (2024)
• C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin (2024)
• Albertina, Vienna (2023)
• Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2023)
• Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2023)
• Karma International, Zurich (2024)
• Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2020–2021)
• Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier, France (2019)
• Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria (2017)
• Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna (2010)
• Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007)
• Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004)
• Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2003)

Select group exhibitions

• Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977)
• Biennale di Venezia, Venice (1978; 1980 Austrian Pavilion with Maria Lassnig; 2007)
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980)
• Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (1975)

Website, Instagram, and Further reading

For more information about VALIE EXPORT’s practice and forthcoming exhibitions, visit Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, her primary representation. View exhibitions featuring VALIE EXPORT on Ocula.

About this profile

Ocula‘s editorial team has edited this profile with reference to authoritative sources including museum collections, institutional presentations, and major publications on the artist’s practice.

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Ocula | 2026